Old growth in the new world
Acclaimed US artist Mitch Epstein on his quest to photograph America’s oldest living trees, as told to International Tree Foundation’s trustee, Stephen Barber.
“hese trees are so artful, so expressive, there’s no consistency to their form… am I being anthropomorphic?”
Pioneering photographer Mitch Epstein is talking about California’s bristlecone pines, among the world’s most ancient living things. From a core sample, one such tree was found to have over 4,800 annual growth rings.
“It’s an enchanted landscape,” he says, “it’s unsettling, the way these trees have endured, 10,000 feet up in thin oxygen and extreme weather — adverse conditions, at least for us.”
On the surface, it’s a departure for Mitch, but his new project has emerged organically from previous work, which has always been predicated on the intersection of human society and nature. In his series American Power, which won the Prix Pictet, a global award for photography and sustainability, in 2010, “trees were a leitmotif, although I didn’t realise it at the time”.
This led on to his New York Arbor project, in which he documented the idiosyncratic trees of New York. “There are so many immigrant species, it’s almost a metaphor for the city itself.” He began to wonder what the American landscape was like before colonisation — before 95 per cent of old growth forest had been cut down.
One day, in the early months of Covid in 2020, he took a tour with Bob Leveritt, an old growth forest expert. They trekked through the remnants of forests in the Berkshire hills of Massachussetts, where Mitch grew up. He now had the subject for his next project. “I realised I had to go west,” he says, “because that’s where the really ancient trees are.”
For the next four years, he criss-crossed the States, returning to the land of the bristlecone pines and the sequoias, “because it beckoned”. Before long, though, “whenever I left New York for a shoot, my mind was less on the pictures than on the inexplicable bliss I knew I’d find in the woods.”
In California, Mitch visited both the coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and the giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum). We are so familiar with images of huge sequoia trees, he says, that “we’re inured to their grandeur. When you see them in person you’re humbled.”
Not long ago, old growth forests were considered of little economic value. Compared with new plantations, trees were too old and misshapen to yield commercially useful timber. But old forests and their ancient trees are havens of biodiversity, acting as huge stores of carbon, while playing host to thousands of species of insects, bugs, lichens and other epiphytes.
For Mitch, these venerable specimens suggest a meditation on his own mortality. “Yet this project is not primarily about us,” he says. “It’s about wilderness whose value is not ours to define… These photographs are my way of […] inspiring the conservation of wildlands for their own sake.”
This article first appeared in Trees, ITF’s annual journal
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